Challenges
- Recruiting strong software engineering candidates
- Ensuring quality and speed of product development
As Swoop scaled, the founders, Ruben Schultz, Amir Ghorbani and Peter Evenson, recruited Joshua Park as their first software engineer. They recognized the importance of providing him with strong technical mentorship through Swoop’s high-growth stages.
The founders were both looking for a way to provide mentorship and growth to Joshua, while ensuring the quality of Swoop’s product as a strong foundation for their growth.
Solution
- Every engineer Swoop hired is matched to a Practica coach
- Swoop positions coaching as a employee perk and recruiting tactic
Ruben identified Practica as the perfect way to provide technical mentorship to his engineering team.
He found that by matching every Swoop engineer with a coach, their skillset grows exponentially in a short period of time. Swoop can hire more junior employees and scale them within six months to a senior role. Ruben explains how this investment helps his employees grow into strong leaders at Swoop.
"We have an internal playbook of bringing in junior people and scaling them up within six months to a more senior role through coaching," explains co-founder Ruben Schultz.
Swoop also positions Practica coaching as an employee perk and a strong recruiting tactic that has allowed them to stand out as an employer and recruit strong candidates.
How Siena confidently transitioned from an intern to a software engineer
Siena transitioned from an internship at Swoop to a full-time software engineer during the Covid-19 pandemic. She missed the office dynamic of collaborating and learning by osmosis from Swoop’s senior engineers.
When she felt blocked on technical challenges at home, her coach was able to structure lessons and practice problems for her to solidify concepts. This dynamic quickly evolved into Siena leading entire projects on her own, with her coach only serving as a senior eye to talk through complexities when necessary.
"The sessions started out much more teacher-oriented with my coach teaching the entire time, but I slowly got the training wheels off. I was guided until I eventually rode the bike myself," explains Siena.
Her coach has helped her feel more confident in her engineering work. She feels more confident in decision-making, presenting ideas, and diving into new areas. She’s looking towards her future of growing into a senior engineer and eventually a management role.
Results
- Quicker product velocity and stronger quality of product
- Hired top candidates because of coaching as a perk
Coaching is integral to Swoop’s product quality and ability to ship and iterate quickly by helping each engineer ensure their code is scalable and unblock them when necessary. Coaching eliminated the need for a CTO or senior engineering leadership before Swoop’s Series A.
Unexpectedly, Practica coaching also helped Swoop create a strong internal engineering culture by helping establish best practices for collaboration, communication, and project management.
"Practica supports us in creating a strong engineering culture. We’ve learned best practices on how to best collaborate, how to conduct code reviews, how to build out processes and how to communicate in order to build the best, scalable product," says Ruben.
How coaching helped Jack build engineering culture and transition to a manager role
Jack was instrumental in building a strong engineering culture at Swoop. He augmented and solidified many of the foundational processes, such as weekly sprints and code review policies. He looked to the guidance of his experienced coach along the way.
Swoop is able to attract top talent not only because of their strong engineering culture, but also because they offer coaching as a perk. Jack appreciates how each member of his engineering team has a coach. He decribes how this creates a culture of growth and learning at every level within the company.
"It's great to have someone who isn't in your organization that you can talk to about work and has the context to understand your situation and its specific complexities," explains Jack.
As Jack transitioned to a manager role, he felt the adjustment was smoother with his coach providing an outside perspective, resources, and advice to lead in him the right direction.
Jack often takes initiative to find ways outside of code to fill business needs and gaps at Swoop. His coach helps him create strategies to make the most impact when stepping outside of day-to-day engineering work.
Swoop is a VC-backed mobility tech company headquartered in Los Angeles.
INDUSTRY
Mobility tech
COMPANY
Seed stage, 22 employees